Simple and sweet, ya’ll. I’m curious and I want peeks into other people’s imaginations.
What are some of your personal favorite head canon theories or thoughts. Like, what’s a fun fact about a playable race’s biology that you just think makes sense? What’s a profession or job that isn’t detailed in the lore but you kind of just feel like it’s there?
Don’t be boring, I’m looking for cool world-building or RP things you have in your noggin.
I probably got more but the ones I can remember off the top of my noggin
Related to this one, I headcanon the reason Forsaken still grow/produce food is because free-willed undead need something to sustain the magic keeping them around. Same logic as how cannibalism heals them and why they can just use otherwise rotting or unappetising food (it doesn’t matter how healthy for you as long as it’s of some level of energy in it).
Does this mean they also still yell “For the Dark Lady” despite not serving her anymore?
Yes.
/10char
Monks use chi energy to empower their abilities. Chi is a form of life spirit energy, but undead are no longer alive. As an undead monk (who also RPs as a monk), my headcanon is that he draws upon the necrotic energy that keeps him “alive” to empower his abilities in the same way.
My head canon is nobody knows what the natural lifespan of gnomes are because we’ve all died from some sort of misadventure (usually engineering related) before we get old enough to die from natural causes.
I think Azeroth is probably two to three times larger than earth. Given how dense it is, the scaling of the ocean, and the fact we don’t even have any southern icecap type location so there’s a whole side of the planet we haven’t seen yet.
My top ones are unhinged madness that are heavily informed by my own biases for or against certain elements of the setting being emphasized. I’d like to think they make sense and I have a rationale behind them, but they’re all still very much self-admitted to just be ideas I like more than anything explicitly stated or implicitly unsaid.
Dalaran and the Argent Dawn, followed by the Argent Crusade to a lesser but still noticeable degree, are not neutral entities. They are neutral in the face of greater threats but are by and large politically inclined to side the vast majority of the time with the Alliance. Dalaran since it never actually functionally ceased being a member of the Alliance, and the Argent Dawn/Crusade due to the fact the vast majority of it’s members are culturally originated in either active members or former members (see; undead in the vain of Leonid or Alonsus).
The Kirin Tor do not really grant membership easily and particularly not to outsiders, so much as they hold an extreme dominion over arcane knowledge within the Eastern Kingdoms. Kael’thas’s position within the mageocracy is a gesture of socio-political goodwill to the historical originators of their craft rather than any allowance of political power. Jaina herself consistently acted many times over as an agent of the Kirin Tor more than she ever did as a representative of Kul Tiras.
Tauren are predominantly herbivores.
Arathor are not barbarians and instead have a cultural aesthetic closer to that of Roman-Britannia.
Night Elves lacked excessive stores of metal due to a reliance on either surface veins or happenstance upon ore in Barrows, their modern metal armor is a result of commerce and trade with the Alliance.
Blood Knights and most Blood Elf priests at that are more powerful than their counterparts in other cultural organizations but possess finite capability due to relying on siphoning energy from the Sunwell rather than fostering any innate power.
Those’re all of the ones I have. More like rambling hot takes on lore, I suspect, but headcanon none the less.
I firmly believe the cannon in Bilgewater Harbor, would absolutely wreck the harbor itself if it was ever fired. If not cause a tsunami on some poor island just from the shockwave.
Think about it, you can feel the pressure from some basic rifles while shooting, now think about the shear size of that cannon. RIP anyone near the cannons hearing.
I’ve long had this going theory about the non-Pandaren masters at the Peak of Serenity. They are survivors, or descendants of survivors, of shipwrecks that occurred near Pandaria due to the Mists, and while marooned on Pandaria they went native.
I figure that is a decent enough in-universe justification for such individuals existing at the time, despite related lore making that not make much sense. The going native bit also explains their names, as I imagine changing one’s name to something befitting a local would be part of that. Of course, there is a more meta explanation that fits just as well, if not more, but that’s extraneous to the topic.
WORGEN HAVE TAILS!
WORGEN HAVE TAILS, I SAY!!!
You cannot medicate this crash out!!! You all know it’s true!
Sylvanas died at the end of BfA, there is no Jailor, there never was, the Shadowlands was a mass hysterical delusion wrought by N’zoth.
It’s also possible, perhaps even likely, that it didn’t end there. Your character and everyone on Azeroth may exist in a Matrix-like mind prison, their body being feasted upon by minions of the Old Gods. When you log off, your character toils in deep quarries to construct massive cyclopean obelisks, the Black Empire being remade brick by brick until you log on again.
Dragonborn really should have just been the base game plot, shouldn’t it?
*The magical cosmology chart we received in Chronicles was all the work of a single man. A controversial Dalaran mage who made it his life’s work to catalogue magic. The chart was his final creation, left pinned to a wall over his cold corpse. He committed suicide as he finally came to terms with the fact that magic, by its very nature, can never be properly organized and fit into nice clean boxes.
I hate that chart so much. Magic should be weird and scary. Not bureaucratic.
Imo at the very least if they want to make magic a ‘science’, make it like economics. Something which has multiple scientific theories in it and causes everyone who’s studied it to argue over which theory is actually the correct one.
For years I’ve felt like I’m going slowly insane being the only person that not only remembers Chronicles, but hated it from the moment it came out as an utterly nonsensical prototype for the same sins Shadowlands would ultimately commit of trying to tediously categorize and demystify every single aspect of the setting.
We already had a very ironclad, intentionally vague creation myth and over-arcing rules of how existence functioned. This does however remind me of a salient point to discuss that has a lot of headcanon surrounding it.
Magical Healing; capitalized in apropos for the broad term. There’s a lot of headcanon surrounding the effects, how exactly it heals someone. Obviously a Druid’s Regrowth is probably not going to be the same sensation as a Paladin’s Flash of Light. There’s room for nuance and artistic liberty in these things.
Where there isn’t is in the limitations, in the efficacy. What has limited Magical Healing is something that I think everyone has forgotten about. Mana used to be a very important resource. It used to matter a lot what spells you casted, of what class you were playing and if it had means to replenish it’s mana or mitigate expenditure. The only really truly consistent way to get it back? Rest and recuperation. Eating meals and hydrating.
To put it simply so that people will understand; Delicious In Dungeon is more lore accurate to magical limitations than most people are today.
I could see why some may make this assumption of tauren with them being a bovine like creature, though Tauren have rites and large facets of their culture revolving around hunting, with plenty of examples of regular consumption of meat.
Quoted from warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Tauren -
" Though the noble tauren are peaceful in nature, the rites of the Great Hunt are venerated as the heart of their spiritual culture. Every tauren, warrior or otherwise, seeks identity as both a hunter and as a child of the Earthmother. Tauren, young or otherwise, seek to prove their bravery by setting themselves against the creatures of the wild. Hunting is a tauren’s greatest honor; at times they hunt for food, at times for honor, and at times to earn the Earthmother’s teachings. Hunters are important to the tribes as a strong part of tauren tradition and history, and are respected and revered if they serve their people well. Young gazelles quickly learn to flee when they hear the war cries of tauren hunters in Mulgore. They don’t hear the good hunters, unfortunately."
Also on the same page under “cuisine”-
" The shu’halo use pine nuts in most dishes: meat, fish, vegetables, even baked into breads or sprinkled over sweet pastries. The very best pine nuts come from the trees upon the very mesas of Thunder Bluff. The fine and noble spice bread of Thunder Bluff is traded in countless settlements in the most far-away lands, even by the tauren’s staunchest foes. One of Thunder Bluff’s most important staples is cornmeal; bowls of corn may be found in nearly every home, and cornmeal biscuits, once merely a staple food among the tauren tribes in Mulgore, have traveled along various trade routes and are now enjoyed in many regions across Azeroth. One of the great delicacies of Mulgore is the crayfish that dwell in lakes and streams. They are particularly popular during weddings or the celebration of a birth.
When the Alliance allied with the Grimtotem tribe in Stonetalon Mountains, Force Commander Valen asked “Cookie” McWeaksauce to cook up the finest of tauren cuisine; an offering no tauren, “not even a grim tauren”, could refuse. It consisted of eagle eggs, ram meat and a special cheese kept by the local kobolds."
I concur. That canon would absolutely devastate the structural integrity of the builds surrounding it were it ever fired. The shockwave of decimal levels would be catastrophic for the harbor and its denizens.
Maybe Taurens hunt vegitables?
“In the time of our father’s fathers the herds of mighty cantaloupe stretched from horizon to horizon.”
That’s not so crazy of a concept considering half the plant life seems hostile, and in many cases sentient in this setting